Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute and theJohns Hopkins University, both in Baltimore, Maryland, havecreated a new master catalog of astronomical objects calledthe Hubble Source Catalog. The catalog provides one-stopshopping for measurements of objects observed with NASA’sHubble Space Telescope.

Hubble has amassed a rich legacy of images and otherscientific data over its 25 years of exploring the universe.All of the images are stored in the computer-based Barbara A.Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), whichastronomers use for their research. The archive isbursting with more than a million images, which containroughly 100 million small sources ranging from distantgalaxies to compact star clusters to individual stars. Forastronomers, however, a major challenge is the difficultyinvolved with sifting through the archival gold mine tocollect the data they want to analyze. The Hubble SourceCatalog now allows astronomers to perform a computersearch for characteristics of these sources, receivinginformation within seconds or minutes.

The Hubble Source Catalog is a database from which astronomerscan obtain the Hubble measurements of specific astronomicalobjects they want to investigate. A query to this databasecan take just seconds or minutes, while previously it mighthave required a few months of hard work by searchingseparate files throughout the archive. This capabilitypromises to open the door to exciting new areas of researchwith Hubble that otherwise might have been too cumbersometo tackle.Read more here:http://hubblesite.org/news/2015/07

Please join +Tony Darnell Dr.+Carol Christian and +Scott Lewis as they discuss the new release of this powerful database with astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute.